Culture and Language

Classrooms are growing not only in size, but in diversity. A culturally diverse and personalized classroom should embrace the multitude of perspectives, socio-cultural relationships, communication styles, and cultural elements that make their community of learners unique and rich with meaning: “A more productive path to fairness is equity, which we define as providing every learner with what he or she needs to be successful.” (global.digitalpromise.org, n.d., pg. 4, paragraph 2).  “Personalized learning offers a path to effectively support the growing diversity of the population of students by understanding how individual learners learn best and actively engage, motivate, and inspire them with the right resources at the right time, in the right medium, and at the right place”, and Multicultural and multilingual learners do need some consideration to feel fully included and supported in the classroom (global.digitalpromise.org, n.d., page 2, paragraph 2). This is another area of opportunity for the educator to learn about the students’ individual cultures, family relationships, current level of knowledge and approaches to learning, communication style, and goals. 

 

Truly culturally responsive teaching is composed of instructional engagement; cultural, language, and racial identity; multicultural awareness; high expectations; critical thinking; social justice (Özüdoğru, 2018). Integrating lessons on civic engagement and modern social movements can help a diverse learning community share viewpoints, learn about each other, develop an open and considerate perspective, and support student growth into responsible citizens of a global society. 

 

Along with cultural integration, diverse learners are often learning English, and just like any language learner, should be provided the opportunity to develop these speaking and reading skills in an adaptive manner. They need to be exposed to “interesting and understandable listening and reading material”, allowed to be silent while acquiring language until they are ready to speak it, provided a stress-free environment for learning to facilitate language learning, monitored regularly for language comprehension to prevent continued error or misunderstanding - as well as to challenge, given space to learn language in a natural order alongside or before applying grammatical rules, and materials provided for the family in native languages (McCaul, 2016). Students will learn at a greater capacity when provided with patient support from their learning community and in turn contribute to the richness of the classroom environment.

 

The resources here provide insight into how to further support a diverse classroom and culturally diverse learners (CDL). The principles of creating a relationship between the educator and student, along with the student’s family and community, remain just as valuable as with any other learner. However, there are other considerations to keep in mind along with the family’s perspective of education, their expectations for the student’s role in the school community, communication barriers, and awareness of implicit bias.